Unlearning The Racist Lessons Of A Southern Childhood

By Hady Mawajdeh,

Published May 21, 2015 at 11:52 AM EDT

Author Jim Grimsley's new book cover 'How I Shed My Skin'.

Jim Grimsley was an 11-year-old boy growing up in Jones County, North Carolina, when the first black children enrolled in his all-white school.

It was more than 10 years after Brown v. Board of Education and Grimsley’s whole world was about to change. Grimsley gets into this in his new memoir, in which he describes the racist environment in which he was raised and how he began to rethink his assumptions.

Host Frank Stasio talks with Grimsley about the first year of integration and why he decided his book, How I Shed My Skin, (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill/2015) needed to be a memoir.

Grimsley is speaking May 21, 2015 from 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM at the Center for Documentary Studies. Grimsley will also be participating in an author event at Pittsboro McIntyre's Books on Saturday May 23, 2015 at 11 AM.

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Hady Mawajdeh

Hady Mawajdeh is a native Texan, born and raised in San Antonio. He listened to Fresh Air growing up and fell in love with public radio. He earned his B.A. in Mass Communication at Texas State University and specialized in electronic media. He worked at NPR affiliate stations KUT and KUTX in Austin, Texas as an intern, producer, social media coordinator, and a late-night deejay.

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Frank Stasio

Longtime NPR correspondent Frank Stasio was named permanent host of The State of Things in June 2006. A native of Buffalo, Frank has been in radio since the age of 19. He began his public radio career at WOI in Ames, Iowa, where he was a magazine show anchor and the station's News Director.

See stories by Frank Stasio